Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021 (opens in new tab)

>gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones

That would involve jailbraking. The nice thing about the M series Macs is that there is an offical way to run alternative OSs, AFAIK. Something that should be required by law after X number of units sold IMO, but that's another conversation altogether.

Once asahi is stable, I would seriously consider buying a MacBook to use as my daily driver

In it's current form I don't think so. It's not optimized for DC/enterprise. It certainly has potential though.

> who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?

Let's say you use a laptop for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and that it lasts for 3 years. That's 4,320 hours of usage. For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that. I'm writing this on a high-end Macbook Pro that's 8 years old. It was very expensive when I bought it, but the "cost per hour" has actually been quite low. The benefit of a better experience during the entire duration of usage is well worth the added cost, in my experience.

I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they wouldn't buy it in the first place (it's not a Prada handbag). Especially for high income earners from wealthy western countries, the cost of ownership can be easily justified for the convenience it brings.

But if you're not currently into the Apple ecosystem, and consider going all-in, the total costs of ownership are indeed a bit eye-watering for those without six figure jobs, if you disregard or don't need or don't care about the whole ecosystem and just look at the specs to price ratio of the laptop on it's own (I got a 13 inch QHD thin and light laptop with an 8 core Ryzen 5800U and 16GB RAM and 1TB NVME removable!!! SSD and 8 hour battery life for 750 Euros, where I can dual-boot Linux and Windows and run absolutely any (non-Apple)SW I could ever need).

So, since I don't need any component of the Apple ecosystem, I can't justify spending double the money to get more limited functionality in return, though I am tech savvy enough to use Windows and Linux and create for myself a similar (and subjectively better) ecosystem to Apple's for cheap/free using various OSS and proprietary SW.

However, lost of doctors I visit and most high-earners I know seem to own Macs and iPhones, so for them most likely it's worth the extra penny for the magic of the ecosystem where everything Justworks(TM) and they don't have to spend extra time learning and fiddling with tech related stuff they don't care for.

And TBH, if I didn't have to worry about money, and didn't have a career and hobbies that required the need to run X86_X64 binaries and Android apps, then I'd probably go all-in on the latest Apple MacBook Pros with extra-ports plus iPhone ecosystem for the convenience and time savings.

I am not what you would call an Apple fan still I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16Gb of RAM in France for around 1200€ a couple of months ago (to replace an early 2011 Macbook Pro - I don't change my personal laptop often). While I would never buy a Macbook Pro, I think the Air pricing was fine. The price is pretty close to other ultraportables, performances are very good, battery life is incredible, the screen is beautiful and I don't mind paying a small premium for a sleek design and good quality control. I don't feel like I wasted my money.

These are pure guesses on my part, but I would guess that 99% of laptops that are sold each year are purchased with 16GB or less RAM and 99% of laptops that have been sold all time have never had their RAM upgraded.

So I would also guess the number of people willing to buy one of these is pretty high. I purchased the MacBook Air and love it. So fast, so quiet. Could I afford it? Yes. But I also typically use a Mac for 5-7 years so I did not consider it overly expensive.

I have replaced my Core i9 with 32Gb RAM with an M1 Air with 16Gb RAM and couldn't be happier.

I work as a platform engineer, code mostly in Go and Python, run VMs and containers as well as some crappy resource-hungry apps like Slack and Signal all day long, and have never felt the need for more RAM on this machine.

YMMV, of course, but 16Gb on an Apple Silicon machine takes you a lot farther than you would imagine. I have co-workers who go by daily with 8Gb M1 machines.

While I've recently stopped using Macs as my primary computers, I can definitely see the appeal of Apple computers for a large segment of the population.

E.g I still have my old MacBook around for running Ableton, because support for pro audio on both Windows and Linux is not great. Linux is almost there with PipeWire support landing in most major distros, but Windows still requires a lot of fiddling with drivers and random EXEs downloaded off the web to get a reasonable setup going. And I'm not even an audio professional, just a hobbyist with very mainstream hardware.

I suspect a lot of media/design/film professionals are in the same boat. Not to mention software developers who want a smoother experience than Windows/Linux can give them. This has always been Apple's market and they don't care about anyone else.

There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.

Most people spend a lot of time on the computer. I can't imagine working around a half screen of data and halfscreen of a keyboard. Make a proper wireless docking station and give me a keyboard and mouse and monitor and then we'll talk. After about half hour staring at a phone screen I'm ready to throw it through a window from the eye strain. I think laptops/desktops will be with us for a while longer.

not sure what's your point..

A wholeful lot of working people need a computer, a phone is not enough.

A laptop that has top notch battery performance and can handle heavy work at the same time, being also very lightweight, has a lot of pluses.

The fact that it is well built and that it is battery efficient is, that alone, sort of an insurance policy. I can see many occasions arising in a timespan of some years where a professional could lose a lot of money if its main work device proves to be unreliable at a wrong moment. It might be more than those 1500 euros depending on the field.

A $200 smartphone isn’t enough for most people. They’ve been sold that ideology but all I see is people struggling with them constantly assuming that’s the best of the future in their hands.

Are there any other laptop currently on the market with similar performance and battery life? It’s not like M1s are the exact same as the models before.

I don't know, when they were on Intel they went out of their way to support dual-booting with Windows.

Maybe if 20XX really does become year the "year of desktop on linux" they'll start to get worried? But for now it seems like an easy calculation that it only benefits Apple to allow easy dual-booting to Linux -- it makes their hardware more appealing to the hard-core geek crowd (w/ disproprtionate mind-share and knock-on effects), while still having essentially zero chance of Linux cannibalizing your every-day user market.

Apple is at no risk of having Linux stealing their users away. Unless someone makes a business of reselling Macbooks with linux being preinstalled and in some magical way that business becomes immensely successful.

Apple explicitly enabled support for this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551...

Nothing. Most Mac users are not buying from Apple to run vendor unsupported OSs. It really doesn't matter to corporate Apple what is going on other than to make sure technical documentation isn't leaked.

> ...the ARM in Macs is on a different trajectory than Intel

Agreed. Yes and:

I'd like more analysis and punditry (predictions) comparing SoC offerings from Apple, Intel, AMD, etc.

Especially wrt Apple's anticipated consumer features and markets, like AR/VR, video chat, integrated Apple Pay, whatever.

For instance, I want to hear more about Apple Silicon's codecs. More about biometrics UX (Face ID, Touch ID).

I think a server optimized SoC from Intel is right and proper. Ditto for Apple Silicon's strategy for mobile and media. And I don't anticipate Apple caring so much about server use cases. Maybe in-house stuff, like server farms for Siri. And I mean "market focus", vs "technical focus". While Apple Silicon is probably fine for server, I don't anticipate Apple caring, leaving those segments to existing cloud providers, eg Amazon's Graviton.

Now that I think about it, I'd like to see an Apple Silicon vs Graviton matchup. Just to get a sense of the landscape. For instance, I'd guess Apple Silicon's TPU (Neural Engine) is optimized for their software stack, whereas Amazon's doing something more general purpose, as befits their respective markets.

Sorry for stream of conscious, blathering for too long. I'm just writing out loud.

Raw performance has never been an issue for me on laptops anyway. I care more about the laptop not sounding like an airport because the fans have to spin at full speed to cope with web browsing. Or having to carry a charger around with me everywhere because the laptop gets 4 hours battery despite having a huge battery pack.

These new macbooks are like a dream. By far the best laptops I have ever used.

"science workloads". What kind of science workloads?

It's not only that. They have the knowhow, and a top-notch engineering team. The iPhone processor were developed over the course of 15 years and grew organically to become the M1. Even if you consider other mobile processors on par with Apple's (they are not) - it will take years before they can be adapted to PCs. And as latest Intel efforts show us processors that were not designed with efficiency as a key target from the beginning cannot be easily modified to challenge the M1 either.

Even without TSMC Apple has all the cards - experience in state of the art chips, phones, tablets and PCs, from the silicon to the software, all in one company. They should do some serious slipups before someone has even a chance to challenge them.

There is good reason to believe that’s not the case. Oh having access to TSMC 5nm to other designs would definitely help reduce the gap, but we can see from like-for-like node implementations of previous A series chips and other ARM designs that Apple has a significant lead in architecture too. M1 has some really impressive new architectural features of its own that it’s hard to imagine their competitors being able to replicate any time soon.

I literally just dropped £4,099 on a fully loaded MacBook Pro 16" with those specs. I could not be happier. Its going to be a great daily driver for many years to come. Also the construction is A+ and solid, makes my 2015 MacBook Pro feel cheap in comparison.

According to MBP 16" price, Apple charges $800 for 64 GB RAM and $800 for 2 TB SSD. IMO that's a reasonable price.

Hey!

I built the initial kernel on an AMD 5800X running Debian - there are cross-compiling instructions on the Asahi Linux wiki.

For bootloader, I'm currently just appending the kernel & device tree to m1n1 (which is the first stage Asahi loader).

I suggest getting started with your rootfs and kernel under m1n1's hypervisor, as the virtualised serial ports make it much easier to debug initial issues.

edit: other than the install script which is linked elsewhere in this comment thread, everything you need is on the wiki in various places :)

There’s at least one Armv8 supercomputer out there today, and it’s a beast too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)

I do, as well, and I don't even know if I'll ever use the result of this project. However, I know it's important work.

It definitely can, but it will not be price efficient since you can buy 3090 for 3k$ and that's the price of macbook pro with single m1 max chip.

It'll be VM, use Parallels as it has better Windows 11 ARM64 support. You do not want to use Windows 10, it doesn't have x86-64 app compatibility like Windows 11. GPU acceleration is decent but no DX12 support yet.

I've been using Windows ARM on M1 as my primary work PC device since ~January when I got a 13" M1 MacBook Pro. I now have a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max. Can share particulars of my Parallels config or answer any questions.

> My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux

I ran the M1 Pro for a whole day during early testing without charging (because we hadn't initialized the USB-C port yet) and didn't even run out of battery. And I didn't even have the power management driver running yet.

> has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt

We'll see how that goes, but I get the feeling Apple's Thunderbolt controllers are going to be a lot less insane than Intel's...

> HDMI port

That's just a DP-HDMI converter and whatever needs managing is managed by DCP firmware; it'll work once DP works.

> audio

WIP, already working on some machines; we just need to write a couple codec drivers to get it working across the board.

> WiFi

That's my TODO for this week, and I have it all planned out already :-)

> when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources.

Good thing these machines don't have ACPI then! :-)

> USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by.

We actually already have a workaround in Linux for USB lockups that affect macOS on these machines, so we're already doing better on that front.

> BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.

That goes via SMC on these machines, which has a very simple interface. That's my TODO right after WiFi :-)

> And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux.

Turns out "official" support sometimes is horrible... we can do better than that.

> I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.

Some people are already using them as their daily driver; I don't see it taking more than another year to be in a very good place.

Judging from the enthusiasm radiating from Asahi Linux I am optimistic in this regard. It seems to be interesting enough to attract a lot of talents, which is the key to succeeding for OSS projects.

The ThinkPad seems a boring challenge in comparison. It won't surprise me if the Linux support will be better for Macs than it is for Lenovo "officially supported" PCs.

Oh wow, this sounds quite painful. I almost bought the X1E, but now I'm glad I didn't.

I'm on a X1 Carbon Gen 9 at the moment. I've had no issues with anything at all, besides having to change some settings on the WiFi chip to prevent the connection from dropping. In fact, Linux has been more reliable with external monitors than my old Intel MacBook.

(FWIW, I have a Dell 4k monitor that has documented compatibility issues with some MacBook Pro models, so that's probably on Dell.)

To be honest, I have been burned way too many times with intel CPUs so I am not sure it is a linux problem at this point.

Both my thinkpad t480 and t14 has cpu throttling, and the quite expensive t14 has it so seriously that it will lock to ~500 MHz and will become barely usable.

There's no HOWTO because the experience isn't up to end user standards; I haven't even gotten around to settling on the precise U-Boot config/boot chain yet, and I don't really encourage non-kernel-developers to try to install things at this point (though we have some folks doing it anyway). Right now the focus is very much on kernel developers doing tethered boots via USB. That will change rather soon, as enough core drivers are getting merged or usable to make this actually useful for people without very high standards (e.g. we just merged in proper keyboard/touchpad support), so now it's worth spending more time on the installer, to get it to the point where the stand-alone boot flow is where it needs to be.

(If you're a developer and you want to do tethered boot and you know what you are doing, the guide is simple: make sure you have macOS 12.0.1 or newer, use diskutil to resize macOS to leave at least 3GB of unpartitioned space, boot holding down power / options / terminal, curl -L mrcn.st/alxsh | sh and follow the prompts, once you're booted into m1n1 you can use m1n1.git/proxyclient/tools/linux.py from another machine connected via USB to run a kernel / initramfs).

Implementing a PSCI mechanism in m1n1 sounds like a nice workaround (I could almost consider it an actual fix, even if it's not totally standard), but I'm a bit surprised:

- Doesn't ARMv8 architecture require supervisor mode? You should be able to just pop a good old Arm Trusted Framework sample, implement PSCI in there just like other standard ARMv8?

- Linux kernel already supports various PSCI-less architectures (rpi4 notably for armv8 if I'm not mistaken), so I don't think upstream would mind about that at all?

I guess your proposed approach makes sense when the target is more than just Linux though, do you have hopes that m1n1 could be eventually suitable to boot Windows?

Does apple use psci too, hence that smc redirects to el2 extension they have?

Battery life isn't great (I occasionally take it out for about 2-2.5 hours which it does manage but a longer duration would probably kill it). Once froze and refused to resume when I tried to put it on standby and I had to do multiple hard resets to somehow make it going again (could be related to S3 config in BIOS) - scared me off to ever try to standby again. Also, I think you are 100% correct on Nvidia + Linux point; I did an upgrade to Nvidia driver version 460 (I think) and it basically made everything so slow that it was unusable. When I tried to downgrade, apt showed that uninstalling the driver would uninstall entire pop-desktop so had to do some hacks to downgrade back to version 450. Thankfully everything works well with that version including multiple external displays so I have locked the version via Synaptic. But yeah, not a great overall experience; someone less experienced with Linux might have (justifiably) given in to frustration and switched to Windows or Mac.